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Forty Years After Woodstock
The famous festival still brings good music to Sullivan County
Aerial view of the Pavilion Stage of the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts
This year marks the 40th anniversary of the Woodstock Festival, which did not take place in Woodstock but in a small farm town called Bethel, New York. The concert featured Janis Joplin, The Grateful Dead, Jimi Hendrix, and The Who, to name a few. Attendees caused a traffic jam nearly 100 miles long, from Bethel down the New York State Thruway to the George Washington Bridge. Around a half of a million young people gathered peacefully for three days of music. The miracle of the festival was that it worked.
In 2006, cable television billionaire Alan Gerry opened Bethel Woods Center for the Arts adjacent to the site of the Woodstock festival, which is a nationally recognized historic site. Bethel Woods includes a museum of the 1960’s and a beautiful bronze and wood concert pavilion with a capacity of 30,000 (about 6% of the attendees of Woodstock).
The Bethel Woods Center was not erected solely as a monument to the days of peace and love. Gerry hopes the center will help revitalize Sullivan County, a former upstate destination that has never bounced back from its Jewish family summer holiday heydays á la Dirty Dancing, when the area was known as the Borscht Belt. And Sullivan County, with its quaint antique stores and renovated B ‘n’ Bs, is ripe for resurgence.
Because of what Gerry has built, some of the original Woodstock participants will celebrate the festival’s anniversary this August 15th: Levon Helm Band, Jefferson Starship, Ten Years After, Canned Heat, Big Brother and the Holding Company, Mountain, Tom Constanten and Country Joe McDonald. The line-up may not include the big originals like The Band, Joan Baez or Sly and the Family Stone, yet the show provides an opportunity to see live music at the Woodstock site on the festival’s anniversary, to learn about the 60s era at the museum, and all in a decidedly less muddy and more civilized setting than the original festival.
Tom Jones, who is also playing Bethel Woods this summer, was probably in Vegas that weekend in ’69 when the youth of the nation were making their famous statement for peace and love. But no matter how much the Bethel Woods Center is a part of the establishment, there is no doubt that sometime during a concert, you will get a chill from the wind running up that famous hill, a reminder that you stand on a spot where forty years ago, something truly amazing happened.
Watch a trailer of Ang Lee’s new movie about the festival, Taking Woodstock, out on August 14.
Catch other great summer concerts at Bethel Woods:
- July 11: New York Philharmonic
- July 18: Bob Dylan and His Band, Willie Nelson and Family, and John Mellencamp
- July 31: Peter, Paul & Mary
- August 1: The Original NY Doo Wopp Show: The Five Satins, The Drifters, The Planotones, The Harptones, The Duprees, Sheps, Reunion & special appearance by Gary U.S. Bonds
- August 21: Loggins & Messina with special guest POCO
- August 26: The Allman Brothers Band & Widespread Panic
- August 27: B.B. King & Buddy Guy